Amazon.com’s Prime Day is often a great opportunity to score deals on storage. I’ve picked up external SSDs and internal NAS drives in the past, because they tend to be heavily discounted. Since I just released the latest version of my book Take Control of Your Digital Storage, Second Edition, I took a spin through the current Prime Day storage deals to find some standouts. If you don’t yet own the book, it’s just $14.99—less than what you’ll save from some of the following deals I’ve collected. (Note that these are affiliate links: any purchases you make earns me a small affiliate amount that helps me as a full-time freelancer.)
- SAMSUNG T7 Shield 4TB, Portable SSD, up-to 1050MB/s, USB 3.2 Gen2, $199.99 (53% off, regular $429.99): This is a “rugged” version of the Samsung T7, a model that I own a couple of. 4 TB of storage for $200! It’s great for storing lots of photo and video content, and the USB 3.2 Gen2 speed is plenty fast enough for editing video from.
-
SanDisk 4TB Extreme PRO Portable SSD, $239.99 (73% off, regular $899.99): For a faster 4 TB external SSD (up to 2000 MB/s), this SanDisk Extreme PRO is a fantastic deal.
-
Samsung 990 PRO Series – 2TB PCIe Gen4. X4 NVMe 2.0c – M.2 Internal SSD, $129.99 (55% off, regular $289.99: NVMe storage is compact and fast, and 2 TB at this price is a good deal. Throw it into an inexpensive ORICO M.2 NVMe SSD Enclosure ($15.19, 20% off, regular $18.99) and you have a small portable external SSD.
-
Western Digital 16TB WD Red Pro NAS Internal Hard Drive, $219.99 (21% off, regular $279): Even NAS (Network Attached Storage) storage fills up after a while, and the advantage of a NAS is that you can swap out existing drives with higher-capacity ones, usually without disrupting the data. (I have an entire section about NAS drives in the book.) You want to populate a NAS with drives designed for them due to the way data is written among the drives. Remember, too, that you’ll want to update drives in equal pairs to get the full use out of them: adding just one could leave a big chunk of its data unused.
-
Seagate IronWolf 8TB NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD, $129.99 (26% off, regular $174.99): If you don’t need 16 TB above, this 8 TB model is priced well. I’ve used a mix of Seagate and WD NAS drives for years and have no complaints.
-
Synology 2-Bay DiskStation DS723+ (Diskless), $359.99 (20% off, regular $449.99): Speaking of NAS devices, if you’re considering making the jump, I highly recommend Synology models. This 2-bay unit is a great starter. Remember that these do not come with drives; you have to buy them separately.
-
Synology 4-Bay DiskStation DS923+ (Diskless), $479.99 (20% off, regular $599.99): For more flexibility, this 4-bay model gives you additional drives for storage and also redundancy. When I’ve upgraded drives in my Synology (a DS418play model), I simply popped out two of the drives while the unit was still running and added two higher-capacity drives in their place. The NAS handles all the formatting and data distribution, so I never lost any information or time.
I understand that shelling out for a NAS and drives isn’t cheap, although the Prime Day deals certainly help. To learn more about what features to look for in a NAS, and what they mean, pick up a copy of Take Control of Your Digital Storage, Second Edition, just updated this week. Even if you don’t take advantage of Prime Day pricing, soon enough it will be Black Friday and the holidays, when more deals come around.
If you like the work I do, please consider signing up for my low-volume newsletter that I use to announce new projects, items, and giveaways that I think my readers would be interested in.
Jeff Carlson | Never Enough Coffee Creations 
How much is an SSD like the Samsung 990 PRO slowed down by a USB 3.1 Gen 2 enclosure, like the ORICO? I watched a video on this subject just this morning, and it showed various tests claiming to show a massive decrease in speed from the Samsung 990 PRO specs. But it didn’t compare to a Thunderbolt 3 or 4 enclosure. Is there a big difference between Thunderbolt and USB in this situation?
That’s a good question. USB 3.1 Gen 2 supports up to 10 Gbps, so it *should* work fine. But real world speeds vary of course. Also, I know there was a limitation in the M1-series Macs that didn’t use the full bandwidth of USB, and couldn’t confirm whether that’s still present in the M2-series while I was updating the book.
I agree that the Orico enclosure plus the Samsung 990 Pro will work fine. The 990 Pro has astounding ratings, when used inside the right computer. According to Tom’s Hardware and others, “The 990 Pro promises up to 7450/6900 MBps, sequential read and write.” In contrast, the Orico enclosure claims, on the Amazon page, “When using high-performance NVMe media, the read/write performance can exceed 900 Mbytes/sec.” So that is about 1/8th the potential speed of the 990 Pro. But still very fast performance for an external drive.
The least expensive external Thunderbolt enclosure that I could find is the OWC Envoy Express at $90. There are several others at around $110 and up. Some of them claim read/write of 3100/2700 MBps. So the Thunderbolt enclosure costs quite a bit more than the Orico USB C, but the performance is potentially three times as great.